Sermon Tone Analysis

By Pastor Glenn Pease

Art Linkletter, some years back, told about the 4 year old son of a Florida woman who got up one morning dragging his leg.

The mother could not find anything wrong with it.

This went on for two days, but he did not complain of any pain.

On the third day the worried mother took him to her pediatrician.

The doctor checked him carefully and could find nothing amiss, and so he sent him to the children's hospital for x-rays.

Again, nothing was found to cause his problem.

Meanwhile little Geoffrey still walked dragging one leg.

Finally after two days of testing one of the doctors asked him, "Geoffrey, why do you have to drag one leg when you walk?"

The little guy replied, "I'm Chester.

I work for Mr Dillion."

Such is the power of TV.

X-rays could penetrate his body and enable the doctors to see his insides, but nothing can penetrate the mind to enable anyone to see the workings of imagination.

This is the unseen realm of the human mind where pictures are developed that can radically altar the world of the seen.

In his imagination this little guy could see himself as something and someone nobody else could see, and that image was determining his behavior.

I saw this power of imagination at work in my oldest granddaughter many years back.

We had just listened to the story of Little Red Riding Hood on a record, and I felt it was well done.

It taught the danger of speaking to strangers.

Little Red Riding Hood should not have spoken to the wolf and told him of her plan to go to grandma's house.

From my perspective it was a good lesson for Sarah to hear.

As I turned the record player off, Sarah responded with her evaluation.

"Parents should never let little girls go to grandma's house all by themselves."

Not there was an insight I never thought of.

She saw it from a different perspective, and sure enough she was right too.

You don't just send little girls out into wolf infested woods by themselves.

So by the power of her imagination she saw a lesson for adults as well as children in that story.

The point is, there is no end to the possibilities of seeing more and more in everything as we let our imagination grapple with issues.

It was by the use of his imagination that Leonardo da Vinci visualized so many of life's modern inventions centuries before they became a reality.

He pictured even things like the submarine and the helicopter.

Everything that is began first in the mind.

George Bernard Shaw said, "Imagination is the beginning of creation."

We know that everything that God made was in His mind first, and even the plan of salvation with the cross and resurrection were in God's mind in eternity before they became a part of history.

All art, buildings, and bridges, and all that man creates also begins with an image in the mind.

The mind has the ability to see the unseen.

It can see something as being real even before it is real, and this seeing of it is the first step in the process of making it real.

Faith gets into the picture here by believing what the mind can imagine or visualize.

It can, in fact, be made to become a part of reality.

Faith, therefore, starts in the mind and its power to imagine or to visualize.

Faith sees the mental image and says, that can become an actual physical image.

This has tremendous implications for healing, because the body does not have the ability to distinguish between a vivid mental image and an actual physical experience.

In other words, the mind can fool the body.

It can, by a powerful image, make the body respond, just as if that image was an objective physical reality.

The image is only pre-reality.

It exists in the mind only, but it can become reality by its impact on the body.

It is the age old idea of mind over matter.

It is now a major factor in the world of scientific healing, and it is a major factor in the world of spiritual healing.

Science and faith are becoming more and more one when it comes to the recognition of the power of visualization for healing.

Elmer and Alyce Green of the Menninger Clinic tell in the book, Beyond Biofeedback, how people can be trained to control their body by visualizing.

They can even cut off the blood supply to a tumor in their body and deny it life.

They can also increase the flow of blood to other parts of their body and heal themselves of all sorts of problems.

I know a pastor who controls serious pain by his training in bio-feedback.

Dr. Nicholas Hall of the George Washington Medical Center in Washington D.C. has reported that people can, by imaging, cause their body to increase the white blood cells and the T helper cells that make their immune system more effective.

Patients who are good at visualization have, by their imagination, caused cancer to vanish, and have cured many other diseases.

The literature on this is so vast, and as I became exposed to it my question was, I wonder if there is an example of this kind of healing in the ministry of Jesus?

It seemed like there should be, for it ties in with faith so perfectly, and it is universal in its potential.

All men can by this means have access to healing.

Such a law or principle of healing should be seen somewhere in the healing of the Great Physician.

So I began to search for it.

I found it in the experience of this woman who had a flow of blood for 12 years.

She became an ideal Biblical example of the millions who have been victims of man's medical ignorance.

She is also an example of the millions who have been victors through mental imaging.

She was both victim and victor, and, therefore, one with whom a large percentage of mankind can identify.

Let's look at her first as-

I.

A VICTIM.

After 12 long years of trying every remedy the doctors of her day could dream up she was not relieved of anything but her wealth.

She still had her bad health, and the text tells us she was even worse.

It would be hard to get excited about your next appointment after 12 years of fruitless treatment.

There is no way to know how much torture she had to endure, and how many gallons of nauseous drugs she had to swallow, but we do know she had to have shed many tears of disappointment as one after another of the prescriptions proved worthless to stem the flow of her life blood.

We can picture an anemic and anxious woman who left no stone unturned to find a cure, and all she had to show for it was many a turned stone.

She was in the category of the incurable.

She was a guinea pig, and they tried everything that could be thought of, but nothing worked.

You can't really blame the doctors, even though many use this text to do so.

The fact is, doctors did not have any really powerful medicine until the 19th century.

For centuries the only reason any of the concoctions they prescribed had any positive effect was because of the placebo effect.

People believed it was good for them and so they got better.

The Jewish Talmud, for example, recommends that a woman with a flow of blood drink a goblet of wine with a powder of rubber, alum, and garden crocuses, or Persian onions cooked in wine.

Some tried sudden shock, or the carrying of a ostrich egg in a special cloth.

Ridiculous remedies, but sometimes they worked for psychosomatic reasons.

For some reason this poor woman had no faith in anything she was given, and the result was she was worse rather than better.

She was not only physically ill, but she was unclean and a social outcast.

She was not much better off than the leper.

One of the reasons she acted so secretly was because she was ashamed to be known publicly, and embarrassed to have her problem exposed to everyone.

She didn't even want Jesus to know.

She just wanted to steal a miracle from Him, and then slip quietly away, and never have a soul know what happened.

She was not looking to be on the front page, she didn't even want back page coverage.

She just wanted a hit and run healing known only to her.

She had been victim enough because of her problem, and she wanted nothing more but obscurity.

It was good to see this humanly hopeless case of the chronically ill victim, for her healing is hope to all who feel their case is hopeless.

Spurgeon pointed out that the church of Laodicea was so sick that Jesus said, "I will spew thee out of my mouth."

That is really bad when the Lord of the church is ready to spit you out.

But it was to this church that Jesus said, "Behold I stand at the door and knock.

If any man hears my voice and opens the door I will come in and eat with him and he with me."

Jesus gave that sick church a visual image of Himself at the door ready to come in and heal their relationship.

If they get this image in their minds and believed it, as sick as they are, they can be made whole again.

This woman was a pathetic victim of her disease, but we want to look at the good news of how she too became a powerful victor.

II.

A VICTOR.

This woman is to healing what Roger Bannister is to the world of sports-a marvelous example of the power of belief.

Bannister lived in a world where it was believed that the four minute mile was impossible.